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Most hospitals (75 percent) administered the survey to all staff or a sample of all staff from all hospital departments.

The 2010 database consists of survey data from 885 hospitals with a total of 338,607 hospital staff respondents. Participating hospitals administered the hospital survey to their staff between January 2006 and July 2009 and voluntarily submitted their data for inclusion in the database.

Hospitals do not necessarily administer the hospital patient safety culture survey every year. They may administer it on an 18-month, 24-month, or other cycle. Therefore, the comparative database is a "rolling" indicator. Data from prior years are retained in the database when a hospital does not have new data to submit, older data are replaced with more recent data when available, and data are added from hospitals submitting for the first time.

In order to keep the database current, data more than 3 1/2 years old are removed. Thus, 65 hospitals that administered the survey prior to January 1, 2006, were dropped from the 2010 database.

Overall statistics for the hospitals included in the 2010 database are shown in Table 2-1a, according to when the data were submitted. The 2010 database includes 347 hospitals carried over from the 2009 report and new data submissions from 538 hospitals. Previous or old data from hospitals that submitted more than once were replaced by data from their re-administration, so the database reflects their most recent survey data. As shown in Table 2-1b, the 2010 database includes 564 hospitals that submitted data to the database once and 321 trending hospitals that submitted data to the database more than once.

Table 2-2presents data on the number of surveys completed and administered, as well as the response rate.

Table 2-4shows average response rate by survey mode. Paper survey administration had a higher average response rate than Web or mixed mode. It is therefore still an overall recommendation that hospitals conduct the hospital survey as a paper survey. But each hospital should consider its prior experience with survey modes and response rates when determining which mode is best.

Most hospitals (75 percent) administered the survey to a census of all hospital staff, or a sample of staff, from all hospital work areas/units. Fewer hospitals (19 percent) administered the survey to a subset of selected staff or work areas/units. Fifty-two hospitals (6 percent) administered the survey to a subset of selected staff and selected work areas/ units (Table 2-5).